A Detailed Outline

You wouldn't go to a football game without pregaming. You wouldn't go to a protest rally without a clever sign. And you wouldn't begin a novel without a game plan unless you want to drive yourself completely batshit crazy.

I've tried to write novels before. I know all too well how easy it is to draft scenes over and over again, until that is all you really have. I didn't have a game plan.

This time, I took some advice from an old English teacher. After putting myself into serious writer-mode, I took a pen to paper and wrote down what the story was about. In writing a detailed synopsis for each section of the novel (plus the prologue and epilogue), I solved plot problems, I was able to see the entire scope of the novel and I was allowed each section to rise and fall with the larger story. Characters started talking to me, explaining why they did things, giving me insight on why they think the way they do, and stories of what kind of people they're like and hope to be.

I wrote a good first draft of the prologue last night and this morning, I finished the first quick edit that made things flow together nicely. I've drafted the detailed plot outline of Part One, and taking notes on things that need to happen in Part Two for Part Three to have the impact it needs. I've been plotting and planning Part Three the longest, because it's the entire crux of the novel. Everything happens in Part Three. Part Four is the long resolution of everything that happens in Part Three, and Part Five ties everything together very nicely.

I wrote a message to myself, dreaming of the highest compliment I could receive, and told myself to earn it. To make it as good as that fake review said it was.

I've settled on a strategy. I'm going to write a clear, concise outline of everything that happens exactly as it happens in that particular section. When I'm satisfied, I'm going to write a quarter of that section for four days. In a week or so, I will have a complete rough draft of the entire section, which I will guesstimate at 40-50 pages each. I will repeat the process for the other four sections, and with any luck, I will have something that vaguely resembles a completely drafted manuscript. The final manuscript, of course, will come with a heavy editor's pen (lucky for me, there is a beautiful and brilliant English teacher friend on the other end of it). And then I will publish it on lulu to have a bound copy to edit and tear apart and take copious notes in to rewrite and rework it until I'm satisfied.

Writing a novel is like coming up with an exercise regimen: If you want to achieve your goal, you have to come up with a feasible game plan you know you can stick to. I know I can finish a quarter of a section in a day. Most people can't.

Find what works, and do it.

And never stop writing.

Encouragement from the Peanut Gallery

Background: I've been working on my novel ("With a Saber and a Gun" - a sort of historical fiction involving Chicago in the late 1960s) for a little over two years now. I have a great cast of characters, my MC's first kiss with my Leading Man is arguably the most romantic thing I've ever written, and the research has been absolutely fascinating. This is the story I always knew I would write someday, ever since I fell in love with history at the age of ten, something that has been inside of me since I discovered rock music, Beat poetry, and was old enough to start making well-informed rulings on social issues. I knew one day I would write a novel about a girl finding her place in the world in a very tumultuous and fascinating point in history, and would be a not-so-thinly veiled commentary about all I believed about sex, drugs, religion, the immorality of war, family, friendship, and love. It would by my fictionalized manifesto on social issues. This was going to be my "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (my favorite novel), the novel I always hoped to read but never found in my favorite used bookstore, and I would write it, (dammit), even if the only people who read it were my friends and family.

But after two years of slogging away on this thing, I couldn't figure out a way to tie everything together and, well, finally finish the damn thing.

Sound familiar?

About a month ago, I had The Breakthrough.

It happened while staying at a friend's house, while he all but ignored me and played video games. The notebook in which I have kept all of my notes, research, and a spattering of scenes I've been working on while my laptop is in the shop, is currently at home, and I'm still at my friend's house, watching him and his roommates play video games. Around Hour Eight of the gaming marathon, I was lamenting the absence of my beloved notebook to my girlfriend. I was telling her how badly I wanted to write and knew there was no way I would be able to type even part of what I had in mind for the third part of a five-part novel on my little iPod device. And that's when I got...The Idea.

I took advantage of the fact that I didn't want to type much on my little iPod device. I went outside, listened to the song where the title and much of the theme came from (I Ain't Marchin' Anymore by Phil Ochs, a protest singer of the time I'm writing about. Awesome awesome awesome song.), got myself into writer mode, and began to type.

What did I type, exactly?

I know it sounds crazy and someone is bound to make fun of me for this, but everybody has been guilty of reading soap summaries in the TV Guide, even if we don't watch them. I asked myself, "Okay, Jen, what happens in Part Three?" And I started writing the shortest, most concise sentences I could (again, because I didn't feel like writing twelve pages with my thumbs on a tiny little iPod) that would basically hash out every major event that happens to every major character in that section.

Later, when I go home and have access to my beloved notebook, I will be able to make a list of everything I wrote down, put it in order, and ask myself a series of questions about it.

Actual Example:

"Andrew dies."

Okay, how does he die? Who is told first? What are the reactions of his close friends and family members? How does my MC (his sister) find out? How does she react in the days and weeks to come? Does my leading man go with her to the funeral?

These are questions I will write down and force myself to answer before I sit down and then write it for real, and I will do this for the other four sections in the novel, even the ones for which I've already finished the first rough drafts.

I'm going to finish this damn novel once and for all. And you will finish yours, too.

Keep writing.